Privacy isn’t a right, it’s a commodity

Privacy isn’t your right anymore. We sold it for pictures of cats and the ability to tell anyone in the free world what we had for breakfast.

I’m not saying it was a bad trade, either. The internet as we know it came about through the monetisation of metadata —information about us — instead of by replicating traditional models of content sales. As a result the internet exploded into a plethora of useful services and platforms of every shape, size, and description. What’s more, it was a great leveller — nobody had more valuable personal information than anybody else, so everyone was able to trade it in for the same kinds of services.